Namastè comes from the Sanskrit “namaskar” and means “I
bow to you” or, better, “I bow to the divine that is in
you”. Life itself, in India, is already religion in all
its gestures and expressions, recognizing in everyone of
us an expression of the infinite manifestation that is
God. But while I’m doing it, I join the left hand that
represents the female principle, with the right one, the
male principle, the diversities, the two opposites, and
I unify them into an experience of unity, that is God in
the most evolved Indian thought.
It soon emerges, from this symbol-gesture, that when one
goes near the divine, the psychosomatic has to be
unified toward a single idea. I suppose that, if I was a
spaceman, once I overcame the dizziness, I suffer from
dizzy spells since I was a child, I would feel reassured,
leaving the Earth, seeing that the Earth is round. We
never completely trust what the others tell us.
Trusting is a very serious problem today. First of all,
we lack self-confidence, and consequently we don’t trust
anyone. This blocks the practical application of our
ideals and inner intuitions today.
The third millennium has started and, even if we decided
the date, and I think it doesn’t have any importance for
the universal development, we got excited. I would like
that this banal emotion increases in everyone, always
more, and causes a reawakening of real will of change
and quality of conscience.
I would like that in future we’ll produce more “round”
thought as our Earth and that humanity will work hard to
unite and not to divide, becoming mentally more plastic
and less sharp-cornered. The human mind, in its
evolution, at a certain point produced the concept of
infinite but, at least for the moment, cannot put it
into practice. This could be the most revolutionary
thought of this new millennium.
The real conception of a society that believes in a
universal and infinite Entity, in which everything is
both itself and its manifestation. In this field the
diversity would represent a reassurance of the concept
that the infinite exists, and the diversity wouldn’t
scare anymore and would be respected.
Many disciplines try from the dawn of time to walk this
way of intuition, Yoga in particular, but sometimes they
fail because their supporters never really had a walk of
inner experience in this sense and they get lost in
separation. The error is when one thinks to be in the
right or believes he knows the only truth without
thinking that man, for his nature, cannot get free from
the subjective. In this way he continues to subdivide
the “Only Truth” in many parts, by offering it as a
whole, maybe in good faith, without being aware of what
he’s actually doing.
Already in the Rigveda, the most ancient text India
refers to, we read:
EKAM SAT VIPRA BAHUDHA VADANTI
THERE IS ONLY A TRUTH, BUT SAGES CALL IT WITH DIFFERENT
NAMES.
I think that this sentence brings with itself an
objective vision that, on the other hand, can come out
only after the complete self-sacrifice in the fire of
knowledge. Practically a utopia… Especially if we
observe the human behaviour nowadays, when man seems to
be more willing to sacrifice himself for his personal
success than for the society’s one.
Anyway he is aware that he’s paying for his
irresponsibility a high price, founded on his
unhappiness. He knows it but, as a child, seems to be
lost and scared. But this is the time to do something:
trying hard to think and act in a “more positive and
objective” way, aware that the way of subjective has
already shown its faults. The subjective has been a
failure, not only when it has been in the service of
humanity. History teaches…
In my opinion, for the accomplishment of a better
quality of the existence, it’s essential today to start
by recovering a more ethic and “dharmic” behaviour. The
study of Dharma, even better, should come before any
other kind of research. I would say rightly! Just see
what happens in our society to understand that, without
Dharma, we have to live in unhappiness, in the
reciprocal mistrust and in insecurity.
The word Dharma comes from the Hindu-European word DHR
that means to support, to keep being and sometimes to
create. So, Dharma is both something fixed, steady and
firm as in Sanatana Dharma (the eternal rule), and the
shape of things, their nature, what makes them to be
what they are, and not anything else.
It’s on the strength of Dharma, in fact, that celestial
bodies follow their way. So, Dharma is a manifestation’s
quality like so the fragrance is a Dharma of the flower.
Anyway Dharma, analyzed from the closest to us point of
view, is law of the Nature and order both of the cosmos
and of the personal life, because it suggests the rules
of the individual behaviour. To live following the
Dharma, the Dharma that is in the conscience of everyone,
means to go to oneself true nature and to bring it in
harmony with Sanatana Dharma (or universal Dharma) is
the real essence of spirituality.
From a practical and human point of view, Dharma is a
code of norms, as the one constituted by the Yama of
Yoga to assure both the balanced social cohesion and
oneself spiritual health.
There are five Yama:
Ahimsa: non-violence, first ethic law, limitation to be
observed and realized to be able to follow the way of
realization.
Satya: veracity. It consists in coherence of words,
thoughts and actions.
Asteya: abstention from the theft that is from taking
something does not belong to us but also to suppress in
oneself the desire of that appropriation.
Brahmacarya: control of instincts, chastity; first step
of the ascetic walk.
Aparigraha: non-avidity, non-possession.
Not to try to follow the Dharma means to be in the
Avidya (Sanskrit word that usually means ignorance). But
Avidya (as we read into the Yoga Encyclopedia) is failed
adhesion to the truth and, consequently, to God and that
brings to destroying consequences as in the whole Hindu
culture is proved by Ithiasa: Mahabharata and Ramayana,
ancient epic poems that assume big importance for who is
looking for behaviour norms that harmonize themselves
with the divine.
So, Dharma is a Sanskrit term that combines the meanings
of divine and eternal law, religious and moral duty,
virtue, true doctrine, and justice. To conclude, I
underline that in a developed social context, everybody
is worthy of respect, because everybody is part of the
infinite Entity. Even more the enemies, our best masters,
that try to hit us where we are weak, by enlightening
us.
I state that a qualified society of the third millennium
(if we really want to be better) has to be founded on
respect, on the awareness of diversity as expression of
the infinite and of the inner experience of the unity.
The experience of the particular that offers itself to
the universal in the rising of a new conscience and
nourishes itself with the light of the more objective
truth, burning in the love’s flame. A qualified society
of the third millennium must hope, trust and believe in
the realization of its best ideals, by nourishing itself
with the joy of belonging to this manifestation and
working for a unifying project of brotherhood. Only in
this way we can have faith in the experience of the
“One” that the laymen call universal experience and
mystics call God’s experience.